I am really pleased to see this announcement because it highlights that Microsoft continue to see OneNote as complementing the function of Learning Management Systems in schools, rather than replacing them. I wrote a detailed blog post about how OneNote and Moodle work fantastically together as each platform has it’s relative strengths and weaknesses that are rounded out by the other.

Pleasingly, new features have been added to the web browser version of OneNote Online, allowing the direct recording of audio into a NoteBook through the browser along with the inserting of files directly into the page:

Recording audio directly into OneNote Online in a browser is a new feature of Microsoft

Lastly, a useful free app that Microsoft released last year called Office Lens now integrates directly into OneNote and and Office365, allowing students and teachers to take photos and save and share them within the school collaborative environment:

Whether collaborating on a project together in OneNote, or simply wanting to record an image or brainstorm and mindmap for future reference, the ability to take a photo and know that it can be retrieved later is invaluable.

It is really pleasing to see that these tools, that have become indispensable in education, have continued to receive regular updates and enhancements from Microsoft and I look forward to seeing how our teachers and students will maximise their value in (and out) of the classroom.

Mystery Skype is a fun activity being played by classrooms all over the world and presents a fantastic opportunity for students to become “global citizens” as they meet other students from around the country and globe. On their website, it is described as:

Mystery Skype is an educational game, invented by teachers, played by two classrooms on Skype. The aim of the game is to guess the location of the other classroom by asking each other questions.

The St Andrew’s College Preparatory School has completed many Mystery Skype sessions now, ranging from students in Year 3 through to Year 8 and the students always thoroughly enjoy the challenge of guessing the location of the other classroom. So far we have played with schools in:

The Mystery Skype to Russia was one of the more exciting and challenging Skypes, as the class was very small and every student appeared to have a different nationality. It turned out that it was an International School set up by Shell Oil and all of the students had parents involved in the oil industry. Here is a video of our Mystery Skype (If you’re interested in recording your Skype calls, check out this affordable plugin):

It’s interesting seeing how different teachers have prepared their students to play Mystery Skype – the American schools often have very formalised “jobs” where some students are researchers, others are questioners, whilst others hold up signs confirming if a question was answered correctly or not. Ultimately, it’s up to each teacher how they choose to play, but preparing students to think about how to ask effective closed questions is critical since answers can only be “yes” or “no”.

The temptation for students to zoom in and ask very detailed questions is almost overwhelming. For example, given the amount of American and Australian television we have in New Zealand our students can guess the accent of the students very quickly, but they tend to then ask very narrow questions such as “Are you in Los Angeles?” or “Are you in Sydney?” Teaching the effective use of atlases is really helpful and can then lead to more useful questions such as:

Are you landlocked?

Are you north of the equator?

Are you on the West Coast?

One of the real privileges I have had helping classes with Mystery Skype is the sharing of Māori culture with other schools that may never have seen any aspects of it before. The students in our Preparatory School jump at the opportunity to sing waiata and perform the College haka and invariably the students overseas love it:

Mr Craig Kemp, the teacher at the school in Singapore and an ex-pat Kiwi, tweeted the view from his classroom:

Mystery Skype is a fun way to connect with classes all over the world and I would really encourage you to give it a go. It is easy to find other classes thanks to the Mystery Skype website and our experience has been the other teachers are thrilled to find classes in New Zealand because they are often “so far away.” Once a connection is made, it is fun to then re-connect and ask questions of the other class for curriculum related topics e.g. if you’re studying weather patterns or transport, why not Skype that class in the US and find out their experiences or views on these things? Finally, Mystery Skyping is contagious – once classes find out their friends in different classes have done it, they start asking their own teacher to get involved. Have fun!

In the last week of the recent school holidays I, along with 5 other secondary staff, attended ULearn15. This annual conference, hosted by Core Education, is arguably the preeminent IT in education conference in New Zealand. This year it was held once again in Auckland – although I must admit to being excited at the possibility of it returning to Christchurch once a suitable post-earthquake venue is finally built!

uLearn15 aimed to allow its delegates to connect, collaborate, and innovate and make a difference by exploring:

Re-imagining Learners and Learning / Te whakaako

Re-imagining Teacher Practice / Te pūtoi ako

Re-imagining Leaders and Leadership / Te mahi rangatira

The clear thematic structure of the conference proved to be a very powerful aspect of ULearn, as it enable more clarification of the exact content of breakouts, and also allowed delegates to focus on one particular area of interest, if they wished.

THREE ENGAGING KEYNOTES:

A feature of uLearn is always the engaging Keynote speakers, and this year we were treated to three extremely engaging keynote presentations.

The first was the American educator, Grant Lichtman. In his speech Grant outlined his vision around generating a positive capacity for change within education. Of particular interest to me was his challenge to ask if your school is Dynamic, Adaptive, Permeable and Creative. The underlying aim of such an educational institution must be knowledge creation. Grant acknowledged that this journey will require all educators to break through the fear and inertia to change, saying that it is

“harder to change if we have been going well in the past. Change is Hard, but not in schools – its uncomfortable” .

A final resource that Grant referred to is the Stairway of Successful innovation. I found this resource particularly interesting as it allowed me to reflect on the changes that I am leading here at school and allowed me to reflect on the success of their implementation.

The second keynote speaker was Dr Ann Lieberman from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. During her long, and distinguished career Dr Lieberman has developed a particular interest in Teacher Leadership and the role that teachers play in implementing and driving change within their schools. A focus of her talk was the success gained by the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program in Ontario, Canada. Dr Lieberman identified the successes that this program had enjoyed, particularly the professional value that was generated within the teaching fraternity. She was also keen to pint out the role that all teachers must play in leadership within their schools. She noted that

“conflict within change does not have to be destructive. Conflict can be constructive”

The final keynote address of the conference was particularly inspiring. Pat Snedden, the Chair of Manaiakalani Education Trust, took delegates on a journey describing the origins, current successes and future of this important trust which aims to improve educational outcomes for children in some of New Zealand’s most socio-economically disadvantaged communities. I had previously heard the story of this trust – but this presentation gave me a fuller understanding of the outstanding work that this group has done, and importantly their plans to help children in similar circumstances around New Zealand to enjoy the benefits accrued by this simply inspiring Trust.

BREAKING OUT:

The most crucial element of a delegates enjoyment and learning from a conference such as this, is the range of breakouts that you attend. This year I made a conscious effort to be on-the-ball regarding the opening of breakouts – to ensure that I got all my top choices, which I did.

Across the three days I attended 7 different Breakout sessions. All of these sessions were extremely well organised, interesting, and relevant to both my role here at St Andrew’s College, and the future direction of education in New Zealand.

One particularly interesting session was presented by Westley Field, an Australian educator. He initially reflected on the importance for a school to have a clear school-wide pedagogy; one that all staff can buy into. He continued, to speak about the importance of student well-being as a catalyst for academic success, and the implications that this has for schools.

“Resilience can be changed, and taught. Socratic questioning can be incorporated as a way to ensure that students are building resilience. This improvement must be happening constantly.”

One of the highlights of my conference was Mark Osborne giving an extremely interesting seminar around leading change in schools, leadership vs management, and the importance of preparing people for change. He also gave some clear strategies that should be considered in dynamic organisations such as schools. I particularly like the question

“what is the opportunity cost of NOT changing”

The session was particularly useful for me as a colleague, Ms Yuill-Proctor, was also in attendance. She remarks that she particularly enjoyed:

“looking at 1st order change and 2nd order change. How to make the transition from 2nd order change into 1st order change smoother.”

Part of the St Andrew’s College delegation enjoying some important social time at the uLearn Dinner.

Attending ULearn is always extremely interesting and worthwhile; I was very impressed with ULearn15. After three years of non-attendance, I was glad to see that the conference appears to be re-energised, and this has definitely rubbed off on me. All attendees from our school found it an extremely engaging and motivating three days.

Moving forward I have learnt a great deal about managing change within my job, and more importantly, supporting staff to engage more proactively with this process of change.

As usual uLearn was heavily tweeted by delegates – feel free to follow me. To catch up on the conference, check out archive tweets from @uLearnNZ or #ulearn15.

Moodle is the Learning Management System (LMS) used by St Andrew’s College at all year levels and is renowned for being very customisable due to it’s Open Source code base. Recently, we partnered with Catalyst NZ, experts in Open Source Software (OSS), on an integration project to extract data from the College’s MS-SQL based Student Management System (SMS) called Synergetic and display this to students directly in Moodle.

The project started with a request from the Deputy Rector, Mr Roland Burrows, for students to be able to see their Fortnightly Notes scores directly. This form of reporting is new in 2015 and the rationale behind these Fortnightly Notes is explained by Mr Burrows:

They provide the opportunity for teachers to regularly report to parents on the contribution that their son/daughter is making to his/her own learning through their attitude and effort

Parents can log into the Parent Portal to see a PDF summary of these scores that looks something like this:

A redacted example of a student’s Fortnightly Notes score

As the name implies, the Parent Portal is not available to students directly, so choosing Moodle was an obvious choice to display this data to students. Whilst considering the possible layout options of this data, we decided against replicating the table view that parents see above and instead decided to present a line graph to students that would visually reflect their attitude and effort in each subject across the entire year. Additionally, displaying Student Attendance information on a per-class basis, along with NCEA results-to-date would add real value for students at St Andrew’s so these features were added to the scope of the project.

CONFIGURATION:

To achieve these outcomes, we needed to partner with Catalyst for the Moodle configuration, and they proceeded to write a custom plugin that would extract data from the MS-SQL database powering Synergetic, import it into Moodle’s mySQL database and then present it to the students. To achieve this, three custom SQL views were created that collated only the information to be displayed in Moodle: NCEA summaries, Attendance percentages and Fortnightly Notes scores. A sample of this data can be seen in this gallery:

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New navigation options under Site Pages

Lastly, the Moodle theme used on the St Andrew’s College Moodle site was modified to include new navigation for students to access this information. Extensive testing was then completed on our development Moodle site to iron out bugs and ensure that the information was being displayed correctly.

DISPLAYING THE DATA:

It was decided to graph a student’s Fortnightly Notes score and Attendance information at the top of each course page in Moodle, so they could immediately see their effort and attendance on a per-class basis. This can be seen in the following animated GIF image as the graphs are generated in real time:

An animated image showing the Fortnightly Notes line graph and Attendance pie chart being generated on a student’s course page

However, to also replicate the Parent Portal summary view, a student could see the scores for all classes on a new page added under the “Site Pages” navigation menu:

Summary view of Fortnightly Notes scores and Class Attendance

For students working towards NCEA they can now see their recorded grades directly in their Moodle account:

A Yr11 Student’s NCEA results

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Working on this project was exciting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was our initial attempt to extract meaningful student data from our SMS and display it elsewhere. Secondly, we believe that providing this information to students visually, and displaying it to them every single time they log into their Moodle course pages, will encourage them with their effort and attitude in class. Lastly, it represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible to present to students in Moodle.

In many ways, this was a proof of concept: could we extract data and present it meaningfully to students in one of our primary learning platforms? Thanks to the customisation options within Moodle, we were able to achieve this and with other recent testing of Microsoft’s new Business Intelligence platform called PowerBI, we anticipate being able to add even more visual information to students in this way (for those interested, the animated graphs are powered by the open source rGraph tool).